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Vol. 12 Issue 36…Dedicated to the Dialogue on Race…September 6, 2009
Intuit's Vibe
Dog Justice
By Mary Neal
Too bad you weren't a dog, my brother
In my heart, I cried
Many more people would care about you
And wonder why you
died
You had no spots or floppy ears
You never fetched a ball
Instead, you were a human being
But poor, black, and
flawed
You died in jail for mental illness
I know down in my heart
Your death would be investigated
If only you could
bark
Dog deaths get swift justice
Their abusers are sent to jail
Poor Mama would have closure now
If you'd had a
wagging tail
But you were made in God's image
And some day, I have no doubt
The mentally ill and American dogs
Will have at least
equal clout
About
Me: Mary Neal is a criminal justice advocate. According to the author,
she was thinking about Michael Vick, the former Atlanta Falcon quarterback, who
was investigated, prosecuted, incarcerated, bankrupted, and fired for his role
in dog fighting, when she wrote this poem. She was also wishing her brother, a
mentally ill heart patient, had received dog justice on August 1, 2003! For
more about Mary Neal's quest for justice for her brother, Larry Neal, who died
as an unidentified detainee in a Shelby County, Tennessee jail, where officials
ignored a missing person report for eighteen days, visit http://wrongfuldeathoflarryneal.com.
Francis Beverley Biddle (1886 - 1968)
One of four sons of Algernon
Sydney Biddle, a law professor at the
Biddle entered private law
practice in 1912, first with the firm Biddle, Paul and Jayne (1912-1915),
followed by Barnes, Biddle and Myers (1917-1939). During his 27-year tenure in
private practice, Biddle served in the United States Army during World War I
(1918) and as special assistant to the
In 1934, President Franklin D.
Roosevelt nominated Biddle to chair the National Labor Relations Board. He also
served as chief counsel of the joint Congressional committee to investigate the
Tennessee Valley Authority (1938-1939). On February 9, 1939, President
Roosevelt nominated Biddle to the United States Court of Appeals for the Third
Circuit. Confirmed by the US Senate on February 28, 1939, Biddle received his
commission on March 4, 1939. After serving in the position for less than a
year, Biddle resigned on January 22, 1940, to become US Solicitor General, a post
he held until 1941, when President Roosevelt nominated him to the position of
US Attorney General.
Bidlde served as Attorney General
throughout most of World War II and is probably best known for directing the
Federal Bureau of Investigation to arrest "enemy aliens" on December
7, 1941, the precursor to Executive Order 9066 authorizing the internment of
Japanese Americans in WWII. Following
In 1947, Biddle was nominated by
President Truman as the American representative on the United Nations Economic
and Social Council. However, when the Republican Party refused to act on the
nomination, Biddle asked to have his name withdrawn from consideration.
In 1950, Biddle was named as chairman of the Americans for Democratic Action, a
position he held for three years. Biddle's final position came as chairman of
the Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial Commission, which he resigned in 1965.
Biddle's writings include The Llanfear Pattern, a novel (1927); Mr.
Justice Holmes (1942); Democratic Thinking and the War (1944); The
World's Best Hope (1949); The Fear of Freedom (1951); Justice
Holmes, Natural Law and the Supreme Court (1961); two memoirs, A
Casual Past (1961) and In Brief Authority (1962); and
contributions to a number of legal publications.
Biddle was married to the poet
Katherine Garrison Chapin. He died of a heart attack on October 4, 1968. He had
two sons, Edmund Randolph Biddle and Garrison Chapin. In 2004, Biddle was the
subject of the play Trying by Joanna McClelland Glass, who served as
his personal secretary from 1967 to 1968. (Sources: http://en.wikipedia.org, http://scrc.syr.edu http://library.syr.edu/digital/guides/b/biddle_f.htm
and www.usdoj.gov/osg/aboutosg/biddlebio.htm)
John Burl Smith
Awaiting execution for a crime
one knows he/she committed is probably a torment for even the coldest of
hearts. But to endure that experience as an innocent individual has to produce
indescribable agony. Then to have the evidence responsible for your conviction
refuted or witnesses recant their testimonies and have a court refuse to
reconsider your case requires incredible mental strength, inner peace or an
unshakable faith to remain sane.
Troy Anthony Davis is one such
person. Convicted in 1991 of murdering off-duty
The Supreme Court sent
Scalia's legal perspective is, it no longer "makes the slightest
difference whether
Justice John Paul Stevens, joined
by Justices Stephen G. Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg in a separate opinion
answered some of Scalia's arguments. Justice Stevens did not judge the merits
of
Twenty years ago, MacPhail was moonlighting as a security guard. MacPhail
intervened to help a homeless man, who was being pistol-whipped by a local thug
that witnesses now identify as Sylvester Coles.
The Court has never ruled on whether a credible claim of "actual
innocence" justifies extraordinary remedies in federal court, when a state
conviction is involved.
Scalia's Dissent
By John Burl Smith
Dissenting in the recent US
Supreme Court's order in the case of Troy Anthony Davis, Justice Anthony Scalia
opinion that "This Court has never held that the Constitution forbids the
execution of a convicted defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is
later able to convince a habeas court that he is 'actually' innocent,"
sent not only shock waves through the legal community but shivers down the spin
of ordinary Americans. The thought that "Once convicted of a crime, one's
innocence becomes irrelevant," redefines the concept of "innocent
until proven guilty." When innocence becomes "irrelevant," law
becomes tyranny.
Pointing to the 1996 federal law
-- the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA) -- which limits
federal habeas review of state criminal convictions and bars any federal court
from hearing Davis' claim because there was no error at his trial that violated
any prior Supreme Court decision, Scalia argued that no federal judge had
"the power to rule in Davis' favor at this stage." The fear is that
if Scalia's argument prevails, the appeals process will no longer be about
innocence but about technical and procedural correctness, in terms of a fair
trial, and not whether someone was wrongfully convicted.
Stevens, on the other hand, said the District judge may have authority to act,
perhaps finding that AEDPA's limits do not apply to "original" habeas
writs of the kind the Justices acted on, or do not apply to a habeas claim of
"actual innocence." In addition, Stevens said, there may be an
argument that AEDPA's habeas limits are unconstitutional if they barred court
review of such a claim. Finally, Stevens said, it can be argued that it would
be a federal constitutional violation to execute an innocent person.
The issue here is not whether you favor the death penalty or not, rather
whether you believe someone wrongfully convicted of a crime should have every
opportunity to have their day in court once they have evidence that proves
their innocence. This is especially important in situations like
Like witnesses in
Thaddeus Jimenez is another example of the difficulty an innocent individual has
reversing their convictions. Convicted of murder in 1993 on testimony that
witnesses began recanting almost immediately, Jimenez's trial judge refused to
grant a hearing when his lawyers petitioned for a new trial based on the
recantations. But in May 2009, Jimenez was cleared of all charges. Shortly
after his exoneration and release from prison, the real perpetrator was
arrested for the crime.
You might think that judges would
be willing to review convictions based on testimony that was later recanted,
but in fact courts frequently ignore recantations when reviewing claims of
actual innocence. Even when courts ultimately allow recanted testimony to
exonerate a wrongfully convicted person, the process is often clumsy and
contradictory.
Then there are individuals like Cameron Willingham, who was executed by the
state of
Former Illinois Gov. George Ryan,
a longtime advocate of capital punishment, exonerated 13 death row inmates and
then suspended the state's death penalty in 2000. He declared that he could no
longer support a system that has "come so close to the ultimate nightmare
-- the state's taking of innocent life."
These few cases show that over
the years thousands of innocent individuals probably have been wrongfully
convicted of crimes they did not commit and some were executed. Accepting Judge
Scalia's argument will redefine the function of the courts and place citizens
at the mercy of those who see the law as a means of protecting its interest and
not the innocent. (Sources: http://episteme.arstechnica.com,
www.huffingtonpost.com and www.newyorker.com)
Innocent but Dead
By Bob Herbert
There is a long and remarkable
article in the current New Yorker about a man who was executed in
Cameron Willingham, who refused
to accept a guilty plea that would have spared his life, and who insisted until
his last painful breath that he was innocent, had in fact been telling the
truth all along.
It was inevitable that some case in which a clearly innocent person had been
put to death would come to light. It was far from inevitable that this case
would be the one. "I was extremely skeptical in the beginning," said
the New Yorker reporter, David Grann, who began investigating the in December.
The fire broke out on the morning
of Dec. 23, 1991. Willingham was awakened by the cries of his 2-year-old
daughter, Amber. Also in the house were his year-old twin girls, Karmon and
Kameron. The family was poor, and Willingham's wife, Stacy, had gone out to
pick up a Christmas present for the children from the Salvation Army.
Willingham said he tried to
rescue the kids but was driven back by smoke and flames. At one point his hair
caught fire. As the heat intensified, the windows of the children's room
exploded and flames leapt out. Willingham, who was 23 at the time, had to be
restrained and eventually handcuffed as he tried again to get into the room.
There was no reason to believe at first that the fire was anything other than a
horrible accident. But fire investigators, moving slowly through the ruined
house, began seeing things (not unlike someone viewing a Rorschach pattern)
that they interpreted as evidence of arson.
They noticed deep charring at the base of some of the walls and patterns of
soot that made them suspicious. They noticed what they felt were ominous
fracture patterns in pieces of broken window glass. They had no motive, but
they were convinced the fire had been set. And if it had been set, who else but
Willingham would have set it?
With no real motive in sight, the
local district attorney, Pat Batchelor, was quoted as saying, "The
children were interfering with his beer drinking and dart throwing."
Willingham was arrested and charged with capital murder.
When official suspicion fell on
Willingham, eyewitness testimony began to change. Whereas initially he was
described by neighbors as screaming and hysterical -- "My babies are
burning up!" -- and desperate to have the children saved, he now was
described as behaving oddly, and not having made enough of an effort to get to
the girls.
And you could almost have
guaranteed that a jailhouse snitch would emerge. They almost always do. This
time his name was Johnny Webb, a jumpy individual with a lengthy arrest record
who would later admit to being "mentally impaired" and on medication,
and who had started taking illegal drugs at the age of 9. The jury took barely
an hour to return a guilty verdict, and Willingham was sentenced to death.
He remained on death row 12
years; only in the weeks leading up to his execution that convincing scientific
evidence of his innocence began to emerge. A renowned scientist and arson investigator,
Gerald Hurst, educated at
The authorities were unmoved.
Willingham was executed by lethal injection on Feb. 17, 2004. Now, a report on the case from another
noted scientist, Craig Beyler, who was hired by a special commission,
established by the state of
The report is devastating, the kind of disclosure that should send a tremor
through one's conscience. There was absolutely no scientific basis for
determining that the fire was arson, said Beyler. No basis at all. He added
that the state fire marshal, who investigated the case and testified against
Willingham, "seems to be wholly without any realistic understanding of
fires." He said the marshal's approach seemed to lack "rational
reasoning" and he likened it to the practices "of mystics or
psychics."
Grann told me on Monday that when
he recently informed the jailhouse snitch, Johnny Webb, that new scientific
evidence would show that the fire wasn't arson and that an innocent man had
been killed, Webb seemed taken aback. "Nothing can save me now," he
said.
About
Me: A
The
A series of trials, or tribunals,
most notable for the prosecution of prominent members of the political,
military, and economic leadership of Nazi Germany after its defeat in World War
II, the Nuremberg Trials were held in the city of
Critics of the Nuremberg Trails, including US Chief Justice Harlan Fiske Stone,
called the trials a fraud. Chief US Prosecutor Robert H. “
Twelve of the defendants at
From these tribunals, the Nuremberg Principles that define what constitutes war
crimes were created. In addition, the Nuremberg Code, which provides ethical
principles for conducting human medical experiments, grew out of the Doctors'
Trial.
During the trials, the
According to two new documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union
(ACLU) under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), the Bush administration
sought to incorporate the Nuremberg Defense in the proposed Convention on the
Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearances." At the time, the
Bush administration was engaging in a program of rendition in which secret
prisoners were transported to and held at "black sites" without legal
recourse. Apparently the
According to Joanne Mariner, an analyst at Human Rights Watch with expertise on
the
Disgruntled wants to know:
In the US, thousands of innocent men and women languish in prison. Even more
are imprisoned for minor offenses, including drug possession. A policy of zero
tolerance has made the
Disgruntled feels: Callous! Sharon
Keller, dubbed Sharon Killer, is a senior
Disgruntled says: President Barack Obama
promised to end the war in
Mailbox: E-Mails, Faxes and
Telephone Calls
Email http://prisonmovement.wordpress.com...The
summer of 2009 had barely begun when Marcia Powell, a 48-year old inmate at
Email www.nytimes.com
...Mentally Ill Offenders Strain Juvenile System...By Solomon Moore... As
cash-starved states slash mental health programs in communities and schools,
they are increasingly relying on the juvenile corrections system to handle a
generation of young offenders with psychiatric disorders. About two-thirds of
the nation's juvenile inmates - who numbered 92,854 in 2006, down from 107,000
in 1999 - have at least one mental illness, according to surveys of youth
prisons, and are more in need of therapy than punishment. At least 32 states
cut their community mental health programs by an average of 5 percent this year
and plan to double those budget reductions by 2010, according to a recent
survey of mental health offices. Juvenile prisons have been the caretaker of
last resort for troubled children since the 1980s, but mental health experts
say the system is in crisis, facing a soaring number of inmates reliant on
multiple - and powerful- psychotropic drugs and a shortage of therapists.
Email www.bbc.uk.co
...Microsoft in web photo racism row ...Software giant Microsoft has apologized
for editing a photo to change a black man's head to that of a white man. The
picture, showing employees sitting around a desk, appeared unaltered on the
firm's